I return to Japan on Wednesday. For those who don’t know, I’ve been splitting my time between Tokyo and the US for the last few years while I complete my third novel, Feast of Shadows, which is proving difficult. (But then, there’s really nothing like it.)

But I am not a Japanophile, nor am I one of that peculiar breed of Westerner who arrives with pockets full of pop culture, bubbling fan of a movie based on a book they never read.

Japan is not anime or hentai anymore than Germany is beer and furry porn, although both include those things. In her art, however, Japan does exhibit an intense fascination with the erotic and the macabre.

Subjects are overwhelmingly female, regardless of the gender of the artist. Men, when they are depicted, tend to be beastly — insects or rapists — or inanimate objects like automatons, or the soulless products of the assembly lines they tend in real life.

But you must not think of the women depicted as individuals, per se, although sometimes they are. Nor are they typically objects, sexual or otherwise, even when portrayed in sexual acts. They are Japan herself.

Japanese people are, for the most part, overwhelmingly polite, positive, diligent, urban, hard-working, respectful, orderly, submissive, and chaste. But they are children of a narcissistic culture which admits no outsiders. Non-Japanese can never become citizens, for example.

Comfortably ensconced in its archipelago, isolated for centuries, Japan fell in love with itself and so banished the rest of the world. The appearance of Commodore Perry and his US naval gunboats in 1853 was such a shock that it is impossible to overstate its significance. Almost overnight, a thousand-year tradition cracked. Japan became schizophrenic.

What followed was the manic and total reorganization of society, the most intense ever undertaken, whereby Japan intended to beat the West at its own game — to prove its superiority and so recapture its sanity and sense of place in the cosmos.

For a time, that seemed immanent. In 1905, for example, Japan became the first Asiatic country to defeat a major Western power. But it was not to last. In the perverse poetry of history, the land of the rising sun, as she called herself, was defeated by the very power of that sun.

Failing a military solution, she tried an economic one. For a time, that too seemed like it might succeed. But ultimately, Japan’s “economic miracle,” as it was called, collapsed in the mid-90s, leaving her deflated and unsure.

The Japanese believe — have believed for centuries — that there is one perfect way to do everything: to be a man, to be a woman, to paint a flower, to make tea, to manufacture a car. Her artisans and craftsmen strive for that one perfect way, which is why their produce is synonymous with quality.

Having discovered she is not the world’s one perfect culture, but in fact a stranger on planet earth, Japan has become trapped in a bland reverence of the past, the old but uniquely Japanese way of life, so unlike any other on the planet. (Her language, for example, is unrelated to any of those around her. Linguists are not even certain where to put it.)

Her people now go about in a kind of rote but incomplete repetition — machines bound by duty and propriety rather than programming — as their society slowly disintegrates around them. The economy stagnant, the population declining, Japan — or what was Japan — is, in a very real sense, evaporating.

Her artists, then, are preoccupied with body and identity (who are we?), with beauty and perfection (what is the perfect way?), with perversion and deformation (what have we become?), and especially with reproduction and death, twins in opposition (can we survive?).

What follows is not a survey. I’m sure I have omitted some big names and misrepresented others. It is merely a personal collection, a sample of the art I’ve accumulated during my time there.

We start with this thoughtful watercolor by Jun Ayafuya in which a schoolgirl walks through flooded rice fields, symbolic of old Japan, toward an unknown destination.

Both her and the landscape, which is roughly Fuji-shaped, are perfectly reflected in the still water, but if you look closely at the tones (or if you invert the image), you can see that the upper half, the “real” part, is actually paler than the reflection, whose sky is bluer and foliage greener. The “real” is in a sense the reflection, and the girl, who is modern Japan, is stuck following a rigid path set by the past.

Note also how the right and left halves of the image are symmetrical — rough reflections of each other, giving no sense of progress. You could easily make an animated GIF of this image where the path continually scrolls underneath her as she walks and nothing really changes.

As you peruse the galleries (click for larger images), keep in mind the themes: body and identity, beauty and perfection, perversion and deformation, and especially reproduction and death — or, the erotic and the macabre.